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An interesting proposal from Jake on a different way of defining how service worker fetch events could be handled under various conditions. For now, I have no particular opinion on it. I’m going to let this stew in my mind for a while.

The focus of the A Book Apart series is what makes it great …and that means having to reject some proposals that don’t fit. Even though I’ve had the honour of being a twice-published A Book Apart author, I also have the honour of receiving a rejection, which Jeffrey mentions here:

In one case we even had to say no to a beautifully written, fully finished book.

I honestly think if browsers implemented this, 80% of client-rendered Single Page Apps could be done as regular good ol’-fashioned websites.

Having to reimplement navigation for a simple transition is a bit much, often leading developers to use large frameworks where they could otherwise be avoided. This proposal provides a low-level way to create transitions while maintaining regular browser navigation.

I quite like this proposal for geo element in HTML, especially that it has a fallback built in (like video). I’m guessing the next step is to file an issue and create a web component to demonstrate how this could work.

That brings up another question: what do you name a custom element that you’d like to eventually become part of the spec? You can’t simply name it geo because you have to include a hyphen. geo-polyfill? geo-proposal? or polyfill-geo? proposal-geo?

Jake has written up the notes from the most recent gathering to discuss service workers. If you have any feedback on any of the proposed changes or additions to the spec, please add them. This proposal is the biggie:

We’re considering allowing the browser to run multiple concurrent instances of a service worker.

Sometimes it’s nice to step back and look at where all this came from. Here’s Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal from 1990.

The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup. There is a potential large benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of information to another one.

This a great proposal: well-researched and explained, it tackles the tricky subject of balancing security and access to native APIs.

Far too many ideas around installable websites focus on imitating native behaviour in a cargo-cult kind of way, whereas this acknowledges addressability (with URLs) as a killer feature of the web …a beautiful baby that we definitely don’t want to throw out with the bathwater.